Tom Cain - The accident man

"Sorry," said Carver. "Think I might have knocked something over. Don't worry. No harm done."

He made the coffees and took them back up to the cockpit.

Carver stood with his mug in his hand looking at the southern shore of the Isle of Wight, which lay straight ahead of them a few miles off, a black outline against a dark gray sky, the bottoms of the clouds streaked by the first orange rays of the rising sun.

"What was that all about?" asked Faulkner.

"I was putting your radio out of action. When we get to shore you're going to need a reason why you didn't radio for help when you discovered your two crewmates were missing."

"There's only one lost."

"I'll come to that. Here's what you're going to do. The moment you get ashore, get the harbormaster to call the coastguard. Then tell the truth. You were drugged. You'll still have traces in your bloodstream. The mug Trench used will still be rolling around the cabin somewhere.

"When you woke up, you clambered up on deck, and both your crew members, Trench and Jackson, were missing. So was the ship's dinghy-don't worry, it will be. Naturally, your first instinct was to call mayday, but the radio was kaput. They're not going to know when that happened. Now you're frantic because two of your oldest friends have disappeared overboard and you haven't got a clue what happened. You certainly haven't got a clue why there are bullet holes all over your boat. I mean, there's no gun anywhere, is there? Now, think you can manage that?"

Faulkner considered for a while, then answered, almost reluctantly, "Yes, I suppose so."

They weren't far from the English coastline now. Poole lay on the far side of the Solent, northwest of the Isle of Wight, to the left as they were looking. There was just a chance Trench had ordered a welcoming committee to greet them, in case he hadn't got the job done at sea.

Carver turned his head right, to the northeast, gazing at the horizon. Then he turned back to Faulkner.

"Change course," he said. "We need another harbor."

Yuri Zhukovski told his people to give Alix breakfast. He'd gone at her for hours. Now he was satisfied that she had nothing more to tell him. He just had to decide what to do with her next. He would use her to get what he needed. It was simply a matter of how.

The servant said nothing as she went into the room, but her presence was enough to wake Alix from a fitful sleep that was really nothing more than a semiconscious doze. She winced as she propped herself up and watched the servant carry the tray toward her. The restraints that had tied her were gone, but the bruises showed up inky blue against the skin on her wrists and ankles. There'd been violence too, and the memories of what he'd done to her were as vivid as the welts on her body.

She looked at the servant, another Russian, as she placed the tray on the table beside the bed. The woman's face was masked in the mute, dead-eyed blankness that had disguised the true feelings of a thousand generations of serfs. But Alix could still feel the contempt radiating off her.

She collapsed back onto the bed. She knew she had to eat, she just didn't have enough strength left to lift the food to her mouth. Later, she thought. Later, maybe she'd try again.

Jack Grantham met Dame Agatha Bewley for an interagency breakfast in the Coffee Room at the Travellers Club in Pall Mall, London. Housed in Charles Barry's 1832 pastiche of an Italian renaissance palace, it had long been the traditional London meeting place for diplomats, ambassadors, and visiting dignitaries.

As an MI6 officer, Grantham was, in theory, an employee of the British diplomatic service, the foreign and commonwealth office. His Travellers membership made a useful addition to that cover, but he was not by nature a clubman and he despised the atmosphere of entrenched, inherited privilege that hung over the gentlemen's clubs of Pall Mall like an old London fog. He had to admit, though, that the place came in handy. He didn't have to worry about finding restaurants or booking tables. He simply ate at the Travellers. That saved time, avoided waste, and increased efficiency. And those were principles Grantham liked.

"I was sorry to hear about your two people in Geneva," said Dame Agatha, breaking a piece off her croissant and covering it in thick, dark marmalade. "It's never easy to lose staff like that, particularly when they're young. No children involved, I gather. That's a blessing, at least."

Grantham stuck his fork into a sausage. He'd gone for the full English breakfast, same as always.

"I suppose so," he agreed. "Anyway, something good may have come of it all. We're starting to get names and faces. We're just not sure how they all fit together."

Dame Agatha was a fastidious woman. She chewed carefully, swallowed, and then, having made sure her mouth was empty, asked, "Anything you'd like to share with us?"

Grantham had just filled his face with fried egg and bacon. "Mmm," he managed, with a nod.

Dame Agatha put down her knife and ignored her food. She sat very still, looking at Grantham over the top of her glasses.

"Go on," she prompted.

"You seem skeptical," Grantham said. "Don't be. There's no hidden agenda here."

"So what do you have so far?"

"Two names: an English male called Samuel Carver and a Russian female, Alexandra Petrova."

"Where do these names come from?"

"Let's just say Percy Wake pulled a few strings, called in some old favors. I asked him, he delivered. At this point, I don't care how."

Dame Agatha gave him a look that suggested she'd noted Grantham's response but had yet to accept it.

"Carver and Petrova-what do we know about them?" she asked.

"Not a lot. Carver has to be an alias. There is no record of any UK passport in his name-not a genuine one, anyway. He has no credit cards, appears on no airline databases, and we can't find any bank accounts. Petrova used to be a low-ranking KGB agent, Moscow-based. She started work just before the wall came down. They used her for honey traps."

He took out a brown manila envelope, opened it, and passed a couple of black-and-white pictures across the table.

"Pretty girl, isn't she?" said Dame Agatha.

"She certainly was when those were taken, seven years ago. She didn't snare any of our agents, but a couple of businessmen said more than they should have."

Dame Agatha raised an eyebrow. "Men are such simple creatures."

"Plenty of women have fallen for that sort of thing," Grantham retorted. "All it took was some handsome Stasi agent saying, 'I love you,' and half the female staff in the West German government were happily passing secrets to the East."

Dame Agatha sipped her tea, thoughtfully. "I suppose you're right. Human weaknesses are universal."

"Just as well, or we'd never find out a thing. Anyway, this Petrova woman disappeared off the radar five or six years ago. She still lives in Moscow, so far as we know. But she's not been up to any espionage activity and she doesn't have a criminal record."

"She sounds like a most unlikely assassin," Dame Agatha observed.

"Either that, or a seriously good one, because she's stayed out of the limelight."

"Seems unlikely, though, doesn't it? One minute she's sleeping with her targets, the next she's killing them. I suppose both acts require the same detachment, a callousness toward the other person. But the training required would be quite different. What makes you think she's involved? Apart from the leak of her name, of course."

Grantham swallowed a final mouthful of sausage, mushroom, and baked bean.

"Two days ago we received a message from a French intelligence agent, off-the-record. He said he knew where to find the people we were looking for and he'd tell us in return for half a million dollars."